Energy priorities

Global warming is seriously damaging environments around the globe, primarily in their ability to produce food. Seventy percent of the worldwide wheat crop was lost several years ago because of widespread droughts. Do we seriously contemplate playing Russian Roulette with our children’s heat-shrinking future food supply by encouraging tar-sands oil, which has four times the global warming effect as normal oil because of its extremely high carbon content?

Instead, we need major subsidies for energy efficiency measures and renewable energy research and development, as Germany and other countries have so successfully implemented — genuinely growing and strengthening their economies in vital response to devastating global warming, rather than exacerbated it yet more as the Keystone XL pipeline would. Our children will pay dearly if this pipeline is built for the primary benefit of already vastly wealthy dirty energy interests.

The current levels of ongoing U.S. taxpayer-forced funding for dirty-energy subsidies shrinks public subsidies for clean energy efficiencies and renewable energy into insignificance, per the Rocky Mountain Institute among other very knowledgeable observers. It’s runaway capitalism at its worst, seriously ravaging the very environment upon which all economies are totally dependent.

Will you publicly speak out for reversing the massive tax subsidies’ imbalances away from planet-destructive dirty energy empires and instead placing the majority of public energy subsidies into energy efficiencies and clean solar and wind instead?

More like this story on LJWorld.com

Comments

The US has no control over what Keystone does with their tar sands. They are either going to pipe it across the US, refine it on the gulf coast of Texas, and sell the products mostly to foreign Western nations, or they are going to pipe it west to the west coast of Canada, and sell it to Asian nations, mostly China. The pipeline is not an energy project for the US at all, as many deluded people believe. It's business, the highest bidder gets the refined products such as gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel.

And, these massive tax subsidies that you mentioned aren't financed very much by taxes. The subsidies are mostly paid for by borrowing money.

We should look in the mirror. The US uses more crude oil per citizen than any other nation, and we use most of it to drive around.

And we should look across the Atlantic ocean at what other nations are doing. Gasoline is heavily taxed there, and since it is so expensive, people use less of it. You mentioned Germany. In Frankfort, Germany, gasoline costs $5.57 (US Dollars) per gallon. That forces people to think before they drive around, and the taxes collected that way are used for the subsidies there.

I don't think that handing out subsidies is going to solve the problem, because they are mostly used by entrepreneurs that are after profits, not reduced pollution. They think of ways to collect the subsidy without considering the pollution at all.

I think that taxation should be based upon how much the purchase of that particular product contributes to pollution, and then entrepreneurs would be working on ways to design, manufacture, and sell products that pollute less.

As they do in Germany, where gasoline sells for $5.57 per gallon at the pump.

Liberty, the 70's Ice Age thing has been debunked but unfortunatley is being used as ammo for the deniers to this day. It was not widely accepted by scientists in the 1970's, but it was picked up by a major magazine. I hear it all the time, the deniers say sarcastically "But what about the ice age that was supposed to come".

Show me a viable alternative explanation that explains retreating ice caps, increased acidification of the ocean and rising sea levels, increased global land and sea surface, ocean heat temps, increasing frequency of extreme weather and the rest. Denialists are good at throwing criticism off the back of their truck but have no real alternative model that explains the data.

Nice reversals on the terms "denial" and "reality," by the way. I think the psychological term for that is "projection."

Nice job of accusing me for something I never claimed, i.e. saying that I believe that the planet is in stasis, which, of course I never claimed to be the case. What I will claim tho is that the rate of CO2 emissions has not been this high for the past 300,000 years, and when it was this high before (for very different reasons: you can have the same outcome for different reasons just as you can drain the battery in your car for different reasons) the climate was also very warm.

Like I said, you are quick on the critique, as weak as it is, but you have no credible model to explain the changes being observed in the atmosphere, in the oceans, at the poles and in the extremes. I am the one who is attributing all of these physical effects to well understood physical causes, while it is you who have no credible alternative theory that explains the data without incorporating the effects of massive releases of GHG caused by human activity. You are depending on bluster to make your case.

It ain't workin, buddy, any more than it did for the mercenary scientists who were paid by big tobacco to deny the link between cancer and smoking. The evidence is getting stronger and stronger, so if I were you, I'd start thinking of an exit strategy from your unsupported claims as it will be more and more embarassing the longer you wait.

I am doing no such thing; in fact I explicitly denied any belief in a static nature of reality, so stop putting words in my mouth.

And how did you justify the huge leap in logic that if reality is dynamic, then no explanation is needed for changes beyond the natural? And what does that wild conclusion have to do with humanity's participation in said reality? We certainly are not static, so by your own logic, how can we not participate in the dynamic nature of said reality?

And once again, your critique of the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data falls way, way short of being credible on any level. You prove that by misstating what the models say (ex: no climatologists have posited that the ice caps should already have melted), nor do you even claim to have a credible alternative explanation that comes remotely close to explaining the data being collected without the contributing physics of GHG that have been released through human activity.

1) Al Gore isn't a climatologist, is he? Didn't know you put such stock in his word. Did you bother to look at the article he is referencing? My guess is that he's doing what politicians do: telling part of the conclusion that fits his side. Show me the article, who wrote it, and then we can discuss the data. Until then, you're just doing an Al Gore.
2) Still waiting on that credible model that explains all of the increasingly overwhelming data that can ignore human-activity-related GHG emissions and explain what is happening. Doesn't exist, now, does it?

1) Citation, please. If you can't bother looking up the article that Gore was referring to, then we can't really discuss the science, since Gore wasn't part of the team of scientists,

2) You have an interesting theory about scientific theories--a decidedly non-scientific one at that. When you say "which is all that the whole theory is based on" tells me that you don't have a grasp of what the conclusion that humans are significant contributors to climate change is all about. Firstly, there is not "a theory," rather there are a host of models dealing with a host of datasets, and those models are continuously upgraded to more accurately backcast and/or forecast. The models governing the dynamics of sea ice are different from the models of land based ice, which are different from those modelling sea surface temperature, which are different from land temperature models, which are different from ocean water acidification, which are different from ocean heat....do you get the idea? It may sound confusing, but the net result is that the same conclusions are coming from a number of different directions, resulting in conclusions that are quite robust and compelling.

You are correct in that I do not see at all that I am assuming stasis, nor do I see at all that I am saying that observed changes must have a non-natural cause. I never said that there are just human causes, nor have I said that there are not other "forcing" factors involved. There are a number of other factors, including solar irradiance and cyclicality, orbital variations, particulates, cloud albedo, volcanic activity, and on and on. But take all of these factors and their dynamics, and they are inadequate to explain the data. Period.

And it's clear to me that you cannot show me a credible theory that shows otherwise.

OK, since you were unwilling/unable to cite the Al Gore 2009 pronouncement at the Climate Treaty talks, I checked around at the usual arctic ice websites and found a scientific presentation put together for COP 15 (climate talks) in 2009, whose introduction was penned by none other than Al Gore. The paper, found at this link:

Title:"Melting ice: a call for action" was pulled together by an international task force of scientists, recognized as leaders in the field and compiled thru the efforts of the Centre for Ice, Climate and Ecosystems, Norwegian Polar Institute, Polar Environmental Centre in Norway.

Seems like a legitimate effort. At any rate, p. 36 has a section on sea ice in the arctic, which I excerpt below:

"A nearly sea ice-free Arctic summer may be expected before mid-century, and relatively large decreases in Antarctic winter sea ice extent are expected by the end of the century.
• Most models predict nearly sea ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean within this
century, some within 30 years. However, the precision levels of model simulations of future sea ice reductions are still not adequate: the rapid decline since 2005 has not been projected accurately by models. Summers almost without sea ice may occur in the Arctic Ocean well before mid-century."

Note that this was only 2 years after the most precipitous decline in arctic sea ice in history, 2007, capping off a decline in sea ice literally decades faster than what models predicted. It is worth noting that while the 2007 low has yet to me surpassed, it was virtually matched last summer, and models have been revised accordingly.

So the bottom line in regards to your news blurb is that it's yet another example of bad journalism looking for the sensational that is not to be found if you bother to go to the source.

I have tomorrow off. Tell me where I should go withing 20 miles to see the effects of anthropogenic global warming. I want to see the evidence with my own eyes.

I grew up fishing at the north end of the Sanibel Causeway. I went there most every week. I came up here to go to school, but two years ago we were back in FL for xmas and I went to my old fishing spot. The tidal marks and barnacle lines hadn't changed and I still saw the same rocks sticking out of the water as I did 30ish years earlier. You can't lie to someone that has been watching what would be a very specific indicator of global warming since the mid 70s.

Looks like the tides are going to change by a foot or so by 2020, if it combines with storm surges.

And while there's never been such a stretch of warm in March as we're experiencing this year, that's the weather, not the climate. Probably the best way to observe climate change is to go out this weekend and buy something that used to winter kill around here 50 years ago but survived in central Oklahoma. It should do just fine around here these days.

We should all be concerned about the problems future generations will have to solve and suffer through.

We are about 40 years late, but we should have begun changing our energy infrastructure when the 70's oil crisis occured. We can do more as individuals, but the real progress will only come when we implement more mass transit, power plants fueled by renewables, and a shift away from carbon based energy.

While name-calling is a pretty lame approach to an interesting link, I think you are onto something: a carbon tax is a very viable way to fund the transition to a low carbon economy. I'm glad you apparently do accept the realities of climate change and see this need for a transition--and even if you don't believe in climate change, oil and coal supplies are not nearly as easy to get to any more, meaning that we can plan for a transition to alternatives now or face a collapse later if we haven't built a renewables network when we have the time and resources to build it.

Corporations exert more control and impact our lives way more than the government ever will....in my humble opinion. I have to say, I trust the government a little more than I trust the big corporation.

Anyone who thinks we need to take drastic, bankrupting actions to avoid doom needs to read this and provide a REASON filled answer why this time they are correct. If you can't, then you need to reconsider your emotional response to this issue and face the fact that you may be wrong.

Hoo boy--it's time to do a little history lesson, I guess, on the outside chance that you are really interested in what happened:

Back when that book was written, there was just a little bit of data to study, and preliminary information indicated that there was enough instability in the climate that we couldn't rule out that we could be tottering on the edge of an ice age.

Well, that got Congress' attention, and they decided to fund some serious money into collecting more data to prove or disprove the issue, since the consequences had the potential to be rather global in scale and catastrophic to humanity.

Well, to make a long story short, the satellites, buoys, and other monitoring devices were deployed, and what came out of the new data was a very clear message: the planet is warming up, not cooling down.

It's called science: look at the data, formulate a theory, collect more data to confirm/deny/modify, continue the process. Doesn't really end, as our understanding of the universe evolves. Sorry about that.

At least you admit they are wrong. Now when you figure out they are wrong because they are puking up the answers that people with power and control of tax dollars want to hear, you'll be in good shape.

I take it by your disbelief that people "are still denying climate change" that you think a high percentage (lets say 95%) do believe in climate change. Given that premise, is it not logical that the "world is filled" with a "bunch of idiots '(lets say 95%)'"?

That's a lot of idiots, but one is just as bad.

I hope that punctuation is right. Anyone that knows the right way to do it receives my kudos in advance. Feel free to read it your way if it's better.

Also, Climate Change, née Global Warming, is a lie. It is corrupt science in the employ of ideological strongmen.

That's too cynical though. You seem like a nice guy. I hope you are a department head that just received a large budget increase to pursue one of the most popular earth sciences. I'd rather chase tornadoes, but to each his own.

"We should look in the mirror. The US uses more crude oil per citizen than any other nation, and we use most of it to drive around. "

This kind of sentiment makes it seem like we are greedy hoarders who won't share; complete BS. We PAY for all the gasoline we use, every drop. If 3rd world countries want gasoline, they can pay for it too.
Additionally, the notion that we're "addicted" to oil is also BS. We're addicted to RELIABILITY. Alternaitve energy won't be accepted until it has the energy density, portability, and reliability of hydrocarbon fuels.

Sorry, guy, I'm going to keep calling you on having no clothes until you can present me with something to back up your claim that climate change is just a scare tactic. You refuse to provide me with a credible reason to not believe in the overwhelming evidence for humanity's contribution to climate change, so I must conclude that your claims are just bluster with nothing behind it.

Lib,
The claims of humanity's role in climate change is vastly different from the claim that the king was selected by God. The role of humanity in the climate is measurable, reproducible and therefore verifiable, and the theories are falsifiable.

Since it is falsifiable, please present a more accurate model that falsifies an aspect of the many models that chronicle the myriad ways humanity changes our planet's climate.

"If anyone posting here or reading this denies that man has, through many different types of actions, changed the earth in negative ways, that person is not living in reality"

On the surface you seem correct, but below the surface, there remains the philosophical argument that a native species may change it's environment, but we cannot judge whether that change is bad or good. Environmental changes of any kind may be negative or positive. If it weren't for a rock hitting the earth, we might be descendents of T-Rex and not mouse-like mammals. Maybe as descendants of dinosaurs we'd be a million years more intellectually advanced. Then again, being a semi-sentient pseudo-rodent decedent isn't all that bad. Some of the girl pseudo-rodent decedents are pretty hot!

Which reality do you want? Mine is philosophy informed by science, but your talking points are easier to mimic. I suppose one is as good as the other.

People with brains care about the environment without your fairy tales. You guys are just like people that believe in god. If their hell doesn't scare us into believing, what makes you think yours will?

It's the only bit of hippieville left in Kansas. Where else would the weird among us go if they don't want to leave Kansas? Liberal? Have you seen that place? It's as dumpy as the political ideology that shares it's name.

At Manhattan High School in 1984-85 in my science classes we were taught about
acid rain and global warming. This was 26 years ago. Coal plant smoke went into
clouds which then rained into bodies of water with the acid byproduct from the coal
plants killing the oxygen in the bodies of water creating dead zones were no aquatic
life could exist. With global warming cfcs and carbon dioxide created smog which
slowed up the the refraction of sunlight as it hit the Earth's surface and the sunlight
was trapped in our atmosphere under the smog from pollution thus warming our oceans
and atmosphere and over time leading to what we're dealing with now. I was 14 when
I learned this. What did you clownlicans learn in school? Manhattan High was a public
school. I imagine you clownlicans would want all kids going to parochial schools
on vouchers where we could be taught the hallucinatory view of jesus riding a dinosaur
and sam brownback looking on. How much denial do you use to believe this nonsense?
Tar sand oil has too much carbon dioxide in it thus effecting the atmosphere and natural
gas has to be heated to separate the oil from the sands. The area where this oil is
removed is near Three First Nations Reserves in Alberta in Canada. Fish can no
longer be taken from the Athabasca River in an area where indigenous people and
rural white people still live off the land. Are some of you sooooo dumb that you have
to be forced to eat polluted fish and water to get the point???? buying the Koch
and GOP lie is bad for your health but some of you are soooo dumb you'd do it anyway.
It's just like watching the fracking workers in the documentary Gasland refuse to drink
the tap water of homes whose water has been contaminated by fracking. Ron White
was right when he said "You can't fix stupid". Unfortunately, much of Kansas is stupid.

We all care about the water and fish, it's just the deceit we don't buy into. It's too bad hysterics like tuskahoma can't believe people would care about and protect the environment for reasons other than the AGW (ACC after a facelift) lie.

And as far as dealing with the vagaries of calibrating temperatures from modern instruments and "proxy temperature records" such as dendrochronology, sedimentation, etc., the following link I think does a good job of showing how much thought goes into the effort in order to be as objective as possible:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/past-reconstructions/

It matters a great deal-- and the increased CO2 is not only raising atmospheric temperatures, it's significantly raising the levels of acidity of the oceans, which will have great effects on biodiversity-- biodiversity that we as a species depend on for our survival.

But as DougCounty points out-- you don't care about facts, only ideology.

actually liberty....you're soooo vain that when you write one of your enlightening????
blogs you're usually the first five comments on your own blog....no egomaniacalness
at all......liberty...really.....thomas paine....john locke.....ben franklin......if land wasn't
stolen or squatted on by settlers up and down the east coast what
would liberty really mean to a bunch of paupers coming from fiefdoms.....

libertyone.....the US Government joined tribes like the Passamaquoddy, Abnaki,
and Malicite in their successful land claim lawsuit against the State of Maine
in 1980. The same situation occured when the Narragansett sued Rhode Island,
the Mashantucket Pequot sued Connecticut and the Catawba sued the state
of South Carolina. All of these states violated the Indian Non-Intercourse
Act of 1790....a federal law. State couldn't treaty with tribes for land cessions
without an act of the US Congress due to the plenary power ascribed to the
US Congress in the Commerce Clause over Indian tribes yet these colonies
did so and got sued for it almost two centuries after the theft. The Oneida
and Cayuga tribes sued New York state for illegal land seizure and a dimwit
like Scotus judge John Roberts wrongly advised in the Sherrill Scotus case
and did away with the claims like states rights gop land thieves usually do.
You know so little and speak so hollow.....

Speaking of missing the argument entirely with obvious obfuscation, Liberty, I'm still waiting for you to come up with a viable alternative explanation to the overwhelming data that shows that human activity is releasing enough geologically sequestered greenhouse gases in the form of CO2, methane, CFCs, et al. to influence the dynamic balance of the climate in ways that are resulting in the observed changes: increased global average temperatures, higher sea surface temperature and ocean heat, increases in sea level, decreased sea ice and retreat of glacial masses in Greenland and Antarctica, increased acidification of the oceans, increased frequency of extreme weather events (both droughts and floods, warm winters and severe winters, etc.) and the rest. Take the human factor out of the myriad of forcings present in the climate (solar irradiance, volcanism, solar cycle, orbital and seasonal cycles, etc.) and you simply cannot come up with enough non-human influences to explain the myriad data.

So how 'bout it? Where's the heat (coming from)? And you need to pony up a real theory based on real physics, not just a cute retort, or I take it that you are the source of all the hot air.

Ah, thank you for explaining why you think the question assumes that nature is static and then spelling out why you think so. I now know why you think I have a problem and so since I'm also a nice guy, I can walk through your assumptions and point out the issue.

You state that "you assumed that A, B and C "can't" change for any natural reason. Once you release that assumption, you'll see your argument is as flimsy as...."

Now here's the crux: I have been saying all along that A, B and C DO change for natural reasons. The Milankovich cycle of orbital perigee shifting DOES make a shift in seasonal dynamics that can help shift us in and out of the ice ages; the sun DOES have an 11 year solar activity cycle and DOES fluctuate in irradiance; the particulate and CO2 emissions of volcanic activity DOES go up and down; cosmic rays DO flash through our solar system, affecting various things on our planet. All of these things are natural forces that affect our climate, and they all fluctuate in varying degrees on their influence. And yet scientist who know far more than I on these forces have concluded that when you take ALL of these "natural forcings" together, the net result is that our climate should actually be cooling if anything. The only way they can get the accumulated forcings (read: shifts in the variables, not a static scenario) to account for the data is by adding in the known physical properties of the various greenhouse gases that human activity has released and is releasing. We are doing this at the tune of around 100 volcanoes 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and while the percentage of GHG is quite small in the total atmospheric composition, they act like a blanket on the earth and trap the heat in a way far greater than what their percentages might imply--but this physical property is well documented and understood.

So does this make it clear that neither I nor my question assumes that nature is static? And how the burden of proof for "denialists" to come up with an alternative mechanism is a valid one, one which the denialists have been totally incapable of doing?

Wow--that's the best you can do? Because we don't know everything, we can't know anything??

And you still deny that the models see nature as dynamic?? I walked you through your own explanation of how you think I and the rest of science thinks nature is static, and showed that both the models and their depictions state nature as dynamic and full of forcing factors that are completely natural, and you persist in saying otherwise. You are the denialist, sir, and have shown yourself to be such to any inquiring mind who cares to follow your line of reasoning.

Wake up to the dynamic nature of reality, in which we humans play an active part.

Sorry, not playing your game of diversion. You're the one who has to explain how the various dynamic natural processes that are accounted for in the variety of climate models are somehow static in nature. Until you can do that, you're just playing tobacco lawyer.

If you can't do that, then we have arrived at exactly what is wrong with your thesis.

And what is the artificial distinction between natural and unnatural causes all about? Releasing huge volumes of geologically sequestered GHG is the direct result of human activity, but the consequences of releasing those gases is entirely natural. If I am poisoned by mercury released from a coal fired plant, the release of the mercury is caused by human activity, but the physiology of the subsequent poisoning is entirely governed by natural processes. The same with the impact of GHG on the atmosphere, the cryosphere, the oceans, and the rest.

Lib, you said:
"You cannot look at certain readings and conclude changes MUST be from cause D."

You say that is what what I and the vast preponderance of scientists in the field who give humans a role in the climate change are saying when in fact this is precisely incorrect. "We" are saying that what we know about "D" is adequate to explain the data, when it is included in the mix, and while science is always open to a different alternative, nothing has been found to fill those shoes.

You still give no clear explanation as to why "D," i.e. the huge volume of GHG released through human activity should be left out. By saying that there are other factors that may also account for the data without identifying those factors is, well, disingenuous at worst and just bad science at best.. To call human-contributed climate change "bad science" and then to not provide a verifiable, reproducible alternative is downright hypocritical.

oh genius (not!!)....the commerce clause treats states and tribes as dependant
sovereigns of the US Government meaning the US Congress which
passed the healthcare act had plenary powers over state and tribal
affairs. Read Cherokee or Worcester V Georgia and Justice John Marshall's
rulings in said cases. Or deny with the power of dumb and try feebly to
clown me because you're stuck at Liberty University with all of your jerry
falwell thought stuck in a white 18th century george will view of things
that doesn't let facts in. Now go study the scopes trial and handle snakes.

you loosing southerners and your states rights and tenth amendment references....
your tenth amendment didn't stop eisenhower from intervening at little rock,
kennedy from intervening at ole miss or the fbi from intervening at philadelphia,
ms in the civil rights murders in 1964. thanks for showing your true denying
nature.....now I know what kind of stupid i'm really up against....